The Magna Carta of Judges, adopted by the Consultative Council of European Judges, endorsing a principle shared in the European legal systems, recognises training as “an important element to safeguard the independence of judges as well as the quality and efficiency of the judicial system” (point 8).
In this perspective, the Italian School of the Judiciary gathers the experience gained by the Superior Council of the Magistracy (Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura – CSM) in the activity of continuous training of judges and public prosecutors, which the reform of the judiciary system (Legislative Decree no. 26 of 2006) entrusted to the School with exclusive competence.
The first Board of Directors took office on November 24th, 2011. On October 15th, 2012, the School’s first seminar dedicated to trainees took place, while the first continuous training programme was launched in January 2013.
Today the School is involved in all areas of judicial training: initial, continuous, decentralised, aspirants to managing positions honorary, for trainees, and international. In addition to the organisation and implementation of training sessions, legal documentation also represents a central issue in training activities.
A rich online library is already available to all Italian judges and public prosecutors on the School’s website. Equally fundamental is the teaching material produced in the context of the training sessions and available on the institutional website.
The Quaderni (Notebooks) series, created thanks to the collaboration with the Italian Institute of Printing and Minting (Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato Italiano), was conceived to allow the widest possible use of the training materials and of the results of the research activity carried out by the School.
It is ideally linked to the series inaugurated by the CSM and dedicated to the training activities for judges and public prosecutors held in the 1980s, which at that time fell within the scope of the Council. The Quaderni individual volumes are freely available on the School’s website and in the virtual library containing official State publications.